Art review of Korakrit Arunanondchai
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Transcript of Art review of Korakrit Arunanondchai
Review of
Korakrit Arunanondchai
Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3
Palais de Tokyo
Published a Hyperallergic.com as
An Installation that Squeezes the Art Out of Painting
hyperallergic.com/233375/an-installation-that-squeezes-the-art-out-of-painting/
All images titled:
Exhibition view of Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3,
Palais de Tokyo, photo by Aurélien Mole
Perhaps art as thoughtful high culture will become like drugs used to be: a transgressive
covert endeavor. If Korakrit Arunanondchai’s passionate but frivolous extravaganza
Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 is any indication
(and it is), we may be living in the stupidest times ever: a state of culture where much
debased art has capitulated to idiocy and banality.
At the Palais de Tokyo, New York-based Thai artist Korakrit Arunanondchai, a 2012
M.F.A. graduate from Columbia University brought to the world’s attention by Hans
Ulrich Obrist in Kaleidoscope, attacks our eyes with dripping lurid paint gone wild in the
presence of fashion dummies. His obscurantist Society of the Spectacle painting-as-
installation foams at the mouth and spits on us, as he poses like a heavy metal, cock rock,
super stud star of painting. His brush is so hard!
Exhibition view, photo by Aurélien Mole
But Arunanondchai’s shtick, which is more like masturbating a corpse than rocking out,
is a defilement of painting, not painting, turning it towards the chaotic stuffed emptiness
into which our globalized culture has plunged us and to which some artists seem to have
little option but to subscribe to. Arunanondchai’s heaving painting installation is
indulgent, boring, farcical and bleak. It is a place where our artistic sensibilities are
blunted by inanity. How much mindlessness can painting accept?
Arunanondchai foolhardily addresses, without critical distance, the all-encompassing
sensation-loving subject of the way many people live now. He has abandoned minority
high culture, which was truth seeking, profound, quiet and subtle, in favor of mass
entertainment, which must be accessible (written large). He presumes the viewer docile
and passive, lapping up his juicy world of splashy appearance. He has reduced the role of
the audience to a kind of stoned, bored, brutalized staring spectator of art as tawdry
theatre, where inner mood shifts from faux violence to unfurnished ridiculousness. His is
a sad devolution for painting, from what it used be. He, sorry to say, raises again
pessimistic opinions about the survival of coherent painting practice that isn’t primarily
entertainment oriented.
Arunanondchai’s bread-and-circuses painting installation makes claims of blending the
Buddhist and Animist framework of Thailand with popular culture. I must ask why
anyone with a thought in his or her head would be participating in such a cultural ideal,
one that is essentially valueless? The show bends (bows, actually) to aspersions of
accessibility at a time in which there is no resistant high culture left. It abandons
criticality and aesthetic discrimination with shifty enthusiasm.
The show is the epilogue to a series of works created during the past four years, about the
making of a painter. Not that this imagined “painter” offers any solutions or alternatives
to the art of painting. Rather, Arunanondchai develops a, what he calls, “memory palace”
for this imagined Thai denim painter.
The installation is divided in two parts. The Body is composed of awful large denim body
paintings, only visible in its entirety from a bird’s eye view. It is presumed to “function as
a landscape and a stage for the audience.”
Exhibition view from above, photo by Aurélien Mole
The Spirit, the second section, presents a video where the artist converses with Chantri -
the invisible main imagined “painter” as voiced by Chutatip Arunanondchai. Here
Arunanondchai’s visual bluntness reduces art to amusement, like celebrity watching or
sports or Trump-a-mania, disconnecting it from the historic reverence that was art. He’s
not a particularly gifted painter/polemicist and not nearly as entertaining as Paul
McCarthy’s “Painter” (1995) character.
His Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3 , as curated by
Julien Fronsacq, leads us away from the history of art as modesty, ritual, mystery and
beauty. This bleak vomit-suggesting painting explosion should be considered by any
thinking person (young or old), exactly once.